City guide Joshua Weinberg along his tour route of the South Beach Warehouse District in San Francisco, Calif on Thursday July 1, 2010. The South Beach Warehouse District is an overlooked and unappreciated part of San Francisco. less

City guide Joshua Weinberg along his tour route of the South Beach Warehouse District in San Francisco, Calif on Thursday July 1, 2010. The South Beach Warehouse District is an overlooked and unappreciated ... more

Photo: Jasna Hodzic, The Chronicle

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South End, the undiscovered neighborhood

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The next time you are in the neighborhood of AT&T Park, take a look around. On Second Street, on Brannan and Townsend streets and the little alleys in between you'll find yourself in the heart of what Joshua Weinberg, a New Yorker turned San Franciscan, calls "the most underappreciated district in San Francisco."

This is the South End and South Beach district, south of Rincon Hill and north of the Giants ballpark, between the bay and Third Street, a very old San Francisco neighborhood now reborn as something entirely different.

Once upon a time, this part of town was the southern waterfront, a place of sturdy brick warehouses, laced with railroad spur tracks like spider webs. The South End was important when San Francisco was a world port, the biggest in the West.

There were brick buildings where wine was stored, where grain was stored, where trade goods from Asia were kept. The names of the past are all over the South End: China Basin, the Oriental Warehouse, Japan Street. The South End was where the Pacific Mail steamers from Asia brought in generations of Chinese to build a new life in the place they called Gold Mountain.

The neighborhood is different now and Weinberg is a self-taught expert on what it was and has become. The old warehouses were converted into condos, or headquarters for high-tech businesses, or restaurants.

One of them, the brand-new American Grilled Cheese Kitchen on Second Street serves gourmet grilled-cheese sandwiches, a far cry from the old lunch places where ketchup was the spice of life and cheap was a virtue. Two of those joints - Red's Java House at Pier 30 and the Java House just south, still remain, like remnants of what San Francisco used to be.

Weinberg, who left New York 15 years ago -"I love New York, but it just wears you away," he said - moved into an apartment near the waterfront in South Beach and discovered a whole new undiscovered neighborhood.

The neighborhood was in transition. He found old warehouses and wondered what they had been, remnants of old rail spur tracks and wondered why they were there. He tracked down the stories.

The word in the neighborhood was that this expatriate New Yorker knew more about San Francisco than many San Franciscans. "I was explaining the neighborhood to people who lived there," he said.

Soon, Weinberg signed up to be a member of the San Francisco City Guides, a 33-year-old organization that has more than 250 trained volunteer guides. City Guides offer more than 60 different walking tours. In theory, the tours are free, but the guides ask for a donation at the end; the money goes to pay for the organization, print brochures and train new guides.

Like the other guides Weinberg went though a kind of walking boot camp - three months of training on eight Saturdays. They learned history of course, but also what Weinberg calls "tour guide skills"- projecting your voice, standing with your back to a building so the audience can look past you.

Another skill is walking backward; a walking tour guide spends as much time moving backward as a defensive end in football. Weinberg can walk backward while spewing out facts and figures a mile a minute.

"Brannan Street is named for Sam Brannan, the impresario of the Gold Rush, who once owned one-fifth of San Francisco, who had an affinity for whisky and women and died in poverty," he says. There is the site of a Chinese fishing village, over here, a famous old warehouse, there a condo conversion, here is where Jack London was born. And so on.

City Guides offer the South End tour on the third Thursday of the month at 10 a.m. Next one is July 15. Like everybody else, they have a Web site: www.sfcityguides.org. Check it out.